Fair Play:
What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the
Meaning of Life

by
Steven E. Landsburg
(The Free Press, 1997)

Reviewed
by Frank Conte, BHI Publications Editor

from
NewsLink, Vol. 2, No. 2, Winter 1998

"The
disconnect between the standards adults impose on themselves and the
standards they impose on their children is rarely to the adults' credit,"
writes economist Steven E. Landsburg in his new book, Fair Play,
a readable exercise in economics as child-rearing.

Adults
tolerate the latest transgressions from Congress or the Oval Office
without much thought, never asking the key "kid" question,
Why?

Adults
profess not to tolerate their children's lying or stealing. Yet each
year, Landsburg reminds us, the folks from National Public Radio lay
claim to roughly five dollars of your income. In doing so, they emphasize
ad nauseum that the U.S. Navy spends ten times as much on weapons. Landsburg
wonders if the pitch made by NPR is made expressly to childless voters
unaware of the manipulation of those in the wonder years. "What
parent could accept an excuse like, 'Sure, I stole the cookies, but
I know another kid who stole a bicycle.'?"

Nor would
responsible adults reward children who forcibly redistribute toys in
a playroom or a sandbox. Yet few individuals challenge the "fairness"
of the progressive income tax.

Fairness,
according to Landsburg, means that those who spend their time earning
a dollar rather than enjoying leisure, have a right to bear the fruits
of the choices they have made. Why should government have a right to
part of that dollar if your neighbor spent that same hour picking wildflowers?

"Children
understand that how you spent your day has no moral relevance to how
you cut the cake," writes Landsburg dismissing at the same time
the claim of egalitarians.

These
observations are not an exercise in mixing apples and oranges. Every
time a child cries "That's not fair," Landsburg says a parent
is forced to confront some issue of economic justice.

Throughout
Fair Play, Landsburg argues that one doesn't understand a simple
idea until he's explained it to a child. It's clear that Landsburg both
as teacher and parent wants his nine-year-old girl daughter, Cayley,
to think like an economist. And in turn as parent, much as economist,
one finds that "kids say the darndest things."

Given
the awful lack of economic literacy in elementary and secondary education,
Landsburg's libertarian lessons are sure to rub up against a village
mentality.

Knowing
that he is sure to leave someone from the National Education Association
aghast, Landsburg stands conventional social responsibility on its head.

"If
you are ever in a position to sell water for $7 a gallon, I want you
to sell water for $7 and not a penny less," he writes, "That's
not because I want you to make a lot of money... It's because it's your
social responsibility to get that water to those who need it most desperately,
and if you charge less than the market will bear then the wrong people
will claim the water."

In an
age in which foolishness often invades public school curricula, Landsburg
recasts the authority of the parent, particularly when that parent faces
stiff competition from government.

Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the classroom, where the quasi-religious
fervor of recycling goes unchallenged. Why should children be forced
to rinse and reuse their paper cups? Furthermore, who decided that the
paper cups were worth more than their time and effort?

As in
his previous work, The Armchair Economist, and his ongoing columns
for Forbes and Slate, Landsburg tackles several issues - immigration,
regulations, government debt, savings and investment, racial discrimination
laws - with great verve. But of all the issues worth discussing, the
most illuminating one deals with free trade.

Given
the enthusiasm to be like one's peers, perhaps the best lesson one can
give a child is that it pays to be different. When her teacher distributed
a litter of guinea pigs, Cayley had her eye on a particular one that
no one else wanted to claim. Hence we see David Ricardo's emphasis of
the importance of differences between trading partners, whether they
be kids bartering toys for collectible pogs or nations exchanging grain
for automobiles.

The advantage
of trade across boundaries isn't that you obtain new trading partners,
Landsberg tells his daughter, is "that you get a lot of new trading
partners who are very different from you." Any company in any country
can make cars and Americans, for example, wouldn't care if they were
allowed or forced to buy Fords. "It's the difference between
an American car and a Japanese car that makes the Japanese car a valuable
option" for the consumer.

China
isn't attractive because it's big. It's attractive because it found
its specialties. "If Chinese animators were as good as Disney's
animators, Disney would have no market in China. The great opportunity
is created by the fact that Americans produce blockbuster movies more
efficiently than the Chinese, and Chinese produce silk shirts more efficiently."

Once a
child knows the importance of being different, he or she can spend less
time worrying about who wants to play with him. People tend to want
to trade with you when you are different. If you're the same, there
isn't any real advantage.

The winds
of trade wars of recent memory suggest that industries that focus on
managed trade - with an emphasis on opening markets and raising tariffs
- could learn a lesson or two from this simple idea.

It may
take a child to illuminate Ricardo for a would-be protectionist.